Page 26 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

Introduction 11

that modulate—and, indeed, “hone” (Hirschkind 2006, 82, 101)—per-
sons into a socio-religious formation. Operating as a marker of distinction
(as Anderson also suggested), style is central to the making of religious and
other kinds of communities. Understood as a “forming form,” style thus
operates in the making of aesthetic formations, both by shaping persons
and by lending them a shared, recognizable appearance—and thus an
identity (see also Benjamin 2006, 43).

III Religious Mediations and
Sensational Forms

As I mentioned earlier, a shift occurred in the study of religion and media
from studying, as Jeremy Stolow put it, “religion and media” toward an
understanding of “religion as media” (2005). The view of religion as medi-
ation has been persuasively argued by the Dutch philosopher Hent de Vries
(2001, see also Plate 2003; van der Veer 1999; Zito 2008, 76–78) who
critiques the conceptualization of media and religion, and technology and
the transcendental, as belonging to two ontologically different realms.
Instead he proposes to understand religion as both positing, and attempt-
ing to bridge, a distance between human beings and a transcendental or
spiritual force that cannot be known as such. From this philosophical per-
spective, religion can best be analyzed as a practice of mediation, to which
media, as technologies of representation employed by human beings, are
intrinsic. It is important to note that this perspective extends the notion of
media, which implies modern devices such as film, radio, photography,
television, or computers—the usual focus of scholars studying media—
toward the inclusion of substances such as incense or herbs, sacrificial ani-
mals, icons, sacred books, holy stones and rivers, and, finally, the human
body, which lends itself to being possessed by a spirit. Such a view of media
as mediators puts in perspective the adoption of typically modern
media into religion, and cautions against a deterministic view of modern
media as technologies that act by themselves (see also Verbeek 2005).
Conversely, this approach also implies that the transcendental is not a self-
revealing entity, but always effected by mediation processes, in that media
and practices of mediation invoke (even “produce”) the transcendental in
13
a particular manner. Indeed, adopting a view of religion as mediation
makes it possible to raise entirely different questions from those asked by
earlier studies of media and religion.
If, as an understanding of religion as a practice of mediation suggests,
religion and media need to be understood as coconstitutive, it makes little